‘Beautiful’ Kamala Harris is making Donald Trump anxious about his chances
As he stumbles to fight back concerns about his age and mental state, the disgraced ex-president made a revealing comment
At 78, Donald Trump is the oldest person to become a major party’s presidential nominee. That fact certainly is working against him now that Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic standard-bearer. At 59, Harris is nearly two decades younger than Trump.
But she also has another advantage that Trump himself hinted at during a glitch-filled audio conversation that the Republican nominee held on Monday with X CEO Elon Musk. Trump made no news as he slurped and lisped through the casual chat, but he did make a comment about Harris that was was very revealing.
Referring to the latest Time magazine cover which features an illustration of Harris, Trump commented: “She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. She looked very much like our great first lady, Melania.”
As he did throughout the conversation, Musk simply agreed.
“She didn’t look like Camilla,” Trump continued, deliberately mispronouncing Harris’s first name. “But she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that.”
Trump’s leering comments about his rival are nothing new for him, of course. By now, even his supporters are aware that he is a creepy and lecherous old man. But as a lifelong salesman, the disgraced ex-president is also very attuned to what people want. Trump is not particularly intelligent, but he has an attuned emotional instincts, including how people respond to the physical appearance of others.
“Trump and Harris are playing out a dynamic that’s prevalent between men and women in modern American culture,” Suzannah Weiss, a sexologist and author of Subjectified: Becoming a Sexual Subject, told me via email. “Kamala Harris has an attractive spirit, is more attractive physically, and is an all-around more attractive candidate. Trump can’t stand that.”
The former president isn’t the only one on his team who has expressed concern about Harris being perceived as more attractive than him. During a Tuesday Fox interview, senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway sounded downright jealous of the Democratic nominee.
“Left to our own devices, Kamala Harris is just one big old blind date. And everybody’s making her whatever they need her to be,” Conway said. “She’s so good looking. She’s so smart. She’s so wealthy. She’s so funny. She’s close to her mom. She goes on really cool vacations. She’ll never break your heart. Everybody’s making her what they need her to be.”
Before, during, and after his presidency, Trump was notorious for hiring people based on how attractive he thought they were, including his former communications directors Hope Hicks and Kayleigh McEnany. The Republican nominee’s current private attorney, Alina Habba, said earlier this year that she would rather be pretty than smart since “I can fake being smart.”
While his remarks about women’s appearances are more infamous, Trump has also judged men for how they looked as well. In 2016 after announcing Mike Pence as his running mate, Trump said that the former Indiana governor “looks very good.” During his single term in office, Trump was apparently drawn to designate Rex Tillerson as secretary of state because of his “central casting” appearance. He’s also repeatedly attacked politicians such as Democratic Montana Sen. Jon Tester and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for being overweight.
More recently, Trump made physical stamina almost his entire argument against Biden. And while it may be hard to remember given so much that’s happened in the intervening years, Trump also did this during his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. “I just don’t think she has a presidential look,” he once proclaimed.
Trump and his allies frequently spread baseless assertions about Clinton being unhealthy, with the candidate himself proclaiming at a rally that she lacked “the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.”
Trump’s willingness to judge others for their looks seems to be redounding against him now that his age, obesity, and frequent verbal miscues have become liabilities compared to the much younger Harris. In a late July poll of registered voters conducted by Morning Consult, Trump trailed Harris by 16 points on whether each was “mentally fit,” with only 48 percent saying that he was. The survey also found that 51 percent thought he was “too old” to be president, and that only 52 percent of respondents thought he was in good health.
These findings were similar to a CBS News survey released this month which found that 64 percent of registered voters thought that Harris had the mental and cognitive health to be president while only 51 percent said this about Trump.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that the polling-obsessed Trump has seen these and other surveys. But there are larger factors at work as well, beyond the particulars of the Harris versus Trump race. In political science studies, candidate attractiveness has been demonstrated to be influential on many people’s votes.
Although everyone wants to say that their vote is dependent solely on issues and ideologies, the political science research suggests that Harris’s youth and energy give her a serious advantage against Trump. Voters seem to be drawn to candidates who appear in tune with the future, both in policy and in presence. Harris, with her polished appearance and happy demeanor seems to fit this mold perfectly.
The research seems to indicate that effect of candidate attractiveness is most pronounced when the office-seeker is female, and that the people most likely to be swayed by an attractive candidate are younger, male, and less politically informed. As it happens, these are the exact people that Trump is trying to reach, by its own admission, as reported by the Associated Press’s Jill Colvin and Michelle Price:
“It’s a very narrow band of people that we are trying to move,” Fabrizio said of the efforts. Since these voters don’t engage with traditional news outlets and have traded cable for streaming services, the campaign has been working to reach them in novel ways.
“There is a reason why we’re doing podcasts. There is a reason why we’re doing Adin Ross,” Fabrizio said, referring to the controversial internet personality who ended his interview with the former president earlier this week by giving him a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped in images of Trump raising his fist after his assassination attempt.
“There is a reason why we are doing all of those things. You know what these people pay attention to? MMA, Adin Ross,” he said. “MMA” refers to mixed martial arts.
Of course, the emotional draw of sexism and racism for many people is very significant, as Trump’s enduring career demonstrates, but he seems to be up against some difficulties that he has not yet faced as a candidate against Harris.
In the social science research, people perceived as attractive tend to receive preferential treatment, experience greater professional success, and report higher levels of happiness. This “beauty premium” suggests that more attractive politicians may have a competitive edge over less attractive competitors. Physical attractiveness has been found to positively influence vote shares in various national and electoral contexts, often serving as a “halo effect” where attractive candidates are perceived more favorably in other areas such as competence and likability.
A 2019 analysis of U.S. House candidate races published by Sebastian Jäckle, Thomas Metz, Georg Wenzelburger, and Pascal D. König found that perceived candidate attractiveness could add as much as 12 points to hypothetical vote share.
In a 2015 study, Daniel Stockemer and Rodrigo Praino found that on average, uninformed participants chose the more attractive candidate about 3.1 times out of 5, compared to only 2.3 times out of 5 when the candidate was deemed less attractive. This suggests that attractiveness can lead to a vote premium of over 25 percent among these voters. If only 10 percent of voters made their decision this way, a more attractive candidate could receive a decisive 2.5 percentage point advantage in elections.
As noted above, uninformed younger men are the exact people Donald Trump is trying to reach to win the election. No wonder he and Kellyanne Conway are concerned about a “blind date” scenario.
Facial expressions also seem play a significant role in shaping voter impressions as well. Smiling, in particular, has been shown to positively affect voter perceptions, especially on campaign posters, though the impact varies depending on the number of candidates in a district and the cultural context. This may be why Trump and some of his associates have been trying to call attention to Harris’s Black ancestry as a way of “othering” her, similar to Republicans’ lies that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States. By highlighting Harris’s Blackness, Trump is trying to implicitly invoke racism in order to remove her beauty premium. But it’s a much more difficult sell than saying “Biden is old.”
“The only real value Trump sees in women is their looks and Harris is conventionally attractive; he can’t use his usual insults on her,” writer and cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux told me.
She continued: “Harris is a light skinned mixed race Black woman and women who look like that are generally regarded as beautiful by White supremacist beauty standards. It’s ironic that he’s claiming she ‘turned Black’ recently when she’s the type of Black he would likely favor.”
In a desperate attempt to counter Harris’s rising appeal, Trump is likely to turn to racial tropes, hoping offset his physical ugliness with bigotry.